Have you considered what might be holding your building company back is a lack of great employees?

Behind every successful construction project is a team of skilled and dedicated workers. The lifeblood of your business is the people who bring plans to life. But in a field where the demand for talent often outstrips the supply, hiring the right employees can pose a significant challenge.

To shed light on this crucial process, we’ve sat down with Paul Sanneman, the founder of Contractor Staffing Source. He reveals six secrets to hiring great employees that will help you overcome common hiring obstacles and create an exceptional workforce for your company.

Get ready to take notes because these tips come from years of experience in the industry and have proven success in finding top talent. Are you ready to level up your hiring game? Dive in! Watch/Listen/Read this episode now!

Builder Lead Converter ATTRACTS, CAPTURES & CONVERTS high-quality leads for builders so they can pick & choose their clients & jobs. Find out how at https://www.builderleadconverter.com
For more information about Contractor Staffing Source- https://contractorstaffingsource.com

 

Transcript:

Today on Conversations that Convert we’re talking to paul sentiment from contractor staffing source and we’ll be reviewing  The six myths of hiring for the construction industry. Let’s get started. 

 

Welcome to conversations that convert Every week we’ll spend about 10 to 15 minutes tackling relevant lead generation marketing and sales topics for remodelers Home improvement companies and home builders. Conversations That Convert is brought to you by Builder Lead Converter, your perfect sales assistant.

 

And now, here’s Rick and Daiana.  Hey everyone, welcome to Conversations that Convert, Daiana is off today, but we do have a very special guest Joining us. I would like to introduce paul santamon from Contractor Staffing Source Paul. Welcome. Thank you for having me I appreciate being here. Yes, and it’s 5 00 a.m. Where you are. So we’re very appreciative. It’s definitely well, you know We’re in Hawaii. Everybody here starts at five, but the good news is we get into two. So that’s like, you know,  right. Then you go to the ocean and every time in the winter people, you know, you say live in Hawaii, people go out because, you know, it’s like, I know it’s where you are, but it’s always like, you know.

 

The lowest it ever gets to 68 and the highest it ever gets is 85. So can’t complain. It’s beautiful country. That is, that is for sure. So we are talking today again about hiring and we’re going to get into the challenges that builders or modelers face when hiring and you, as I understand it with contractor staffing source are the largest.

 

Recruiter in the construction industry. Is that right? Yeah, I didn’t start out that way, but it sort of ended up that way. And you know, it was funny because I started this business like four years ago, right? I’ve been a coach for 40 years. I’m an old guy. I’ve been, I’ve worked with thousands of contractors and what happened, Rick was about four years ago.

 

I could build businesses because I’m really good at marketing between, you know, to a million to 10 million, million to 15 million. I did a bunch. Yeah. But the problem was growing a business doesn’t do any good unless you have people to do the work, right?  so My clients couldn’t they I could get them bigger, but they couldn’t find employees So I said how hard can that be so I went out and found some really good software Found some, you know sort of best practices and a lot of it depends on you know, how you use the software So I gave my software to the clients And they totally messed it up.

 

They didn’t have time to do it. Right. So I went, okay, fine. Well, I put a guy in my garage, literally put a guy in my garage. And now we have about 30 people on the team. They’re all over the world. I think we could run 400 job openings any given day. And we usually go through two or 3000 resumes a week. We hire like 10 people a week and it’s just all us in Canada.

 

And it grew a lot because apparently there’s a big demand for this. And we’re pretty good at it. I think last year, okay. We hired about 480 people and only people, only 17 didn’t work out. And that’s because I actually do the best practice of hiring, which is something that a lot of contractors don’t do.

 

The problem is they say there’s no people just like people say, there’s nobody wants their service. It’s a process problem. If people use the right process, you can find all the people you need. Like if people use the right process, you can find all the clients you need. And you know, Rick, if you have all the clients you need and all the employees you need, and you have great clients and great people, it’s a really great industry to be in.

 

But if you don’t have good clients, you’re not marketing effectively. And you don’t have good people. It’s really hard.  You know, that’s so, that’s so true. So we met at the Job Tread Connect conference. And started talking about things and I, you know, I’m a client of yours right now too, I guess, full disclosure which is great because I get to see your service from, as a, as a client, as from the inside perspective, and you’re helping me find some people for our team as, as we are growing.

 

So for that. I used to hire people when I was doing my coaching and I was subcontracting sales management, I would hire salespeople and you’re right. It is a process is an absolute process. And it’s real easy to see a bright, shiny object and go like, Oh, this is my guy, or this is my gal. And you make that hire and you start the training process and you get six months into it.

 

And then all of a sudden you realize like, man, the person quits, or you have to let them go because you just made the worst mistake ever. And so I would always look at that and say. You’re going to put yourself backwards. You’re going, you’re, you’re actually going backwards. If you make that wrong, hire in front, I understand there’s no guarantees.

 

But one of the things that we were talking about a little bit before the call here today is you said there’s really, there’s six myths.  Well, yeah, there’s six, there’s six minutes. This is, I’ve been in construction all my life and. These are the things that contractors believe that get in the way of them succeeding in hiring.

 

All right I think part of why you went from people think marketing is expensive same kind of thing, right? So it’s like it’s a myth, but first myth is you know only recruit when you need someone  I mean, contrary, I’ve had this problem or something. People go, well, I need a guy I’m going to recruit for the guy and I’m done.

 

That’s a myth. Only recruiting someone. There is no successful company. I know that doesn’t recruit all the time.  And if you should recruit all the time, I’ve been trying to convince people to do that. Ever since I started this business, I’ve changed my pricing structure to try to encourage that, but you should always be recruiting.

 

Just don’t think you’re recruiting. You need somebody. The second myth is employees are expensive. Oh, I can’t afford that guy. Right? And that’s not true. You can’t make any money without employees in this business. They’re the best investment you’re ever going to make. So employees are not expensive.

 

They’re really  their best investment going to make.  And the third myth is we can do the recruiting ourselves. How hard is this to do? Man, I put an ad in indeed, you know, I call the guy a week later and he’s already got a job. How come I didn’t work out? Right? So it’s like, you know, You need to hire somebody, either us or somebody.

 

There’s a lot of people that are good at this. I mean, you don’t fix your own car. Do you, Rick? Usually nowadays, I’m assuming that’s right. Probably do. You don’t, you don’t do your own accounting. I’m guessing.  Also a lot of subcontracts, you have no problem with them outsourcing, even electrical or plumbing or all this kind of stuff.

 

But somehow everybody thinks, Oh, I’m a great recruiter. How hard can this be?  It’s like marketing, you know, get somebody knows what the heck they’re doing. It’s what it’s the best investments you’re going to make. The next one, this, I really liked this, this method is recruit within the construction industry.

 

I run into this all the time. I want a, a selection coordinator that has, you know, five years experience in construction. Or I’m an office manager. It is not true. For example, D. R. Hurtins and Lenard, those big companies, they will not even hire anybody with construction fears because they don’t want them to learn the wrong way.

 

They only hire people without experience. Example in our business, we’ve hired a lot of selection coordinators, office managers. Think about this, Rick, a wedding planner, right? Think about a wedding planner. Wedding planner has to get a bunch of people together, the band you know, the firecrackers. 

 

And no offense, those industries aren’t the most stable. You can’t count on everybody’s going to be at the right time. So the sort of flaky industries, they all get to be at the right time at the right place and everybody has to be happy and it’s got to come off well and look good. Sounds like a remodel to me.

 

Right. Yeah.  Thing is people do that. because they want to do that and they have the talent to do that. So we’ve hired a lot of wedding planners and just killed it as selection coordinators or office managers, that kind of thing. So it is not true. Go, go outside the industry. You’re looking for who people are, not what they know.

 

You can teach them stuff, but you can’t teach them to be good human being. So hire who they are, not what they know and look outside of the industry. The next one, Oh, this gets everybody in trouble.  It’s higher fast and fire slow. You talked about earlier,  you hire fast cause desperate. I don’t hire the guy until after I need him.

 

And Oh my God, I need the guy. And so you hire fast cause you need the guy right away.  That’s not really bad news, Rick. The really bad news is firing slow. You get the guy in the organization, right? And the guy or woman in the organization, you brought him on because you were desperate. Now you’ve spent years building this culture, everybody’s honest or trusting there.

 

You’ve built this great culture was taking you years to create. Then you put in the guy or the woman who’s like not that good, you know, they only lie. Sometimes they only steal occasionally  And they just show a dojo once in a while and what happens is it kills your culture? Because everybody goes look at this guy shows up late.

 

He gets paid this guy, you know stole the nail gun Nobody noticed this guy, you know lied to a client. Nobody seemed to care. So it just destroys your culture And that’s the world’s worst employee, you know, bad enough to, what is that good enough to keep her bad enough to fire and they kill your culture, but you fire slow because you haven’t got anybody else to replace him.

 

So not only does it, it, the person not work out, that’s not the worst part. The worst part is he kills the culture. You spent years developing. And it’s really hard to recuperate from that. The truth is you should hire slow. Literally take the time, find the people, always be recruiting, make the decisions slowly so you’ve got the right person.

 

Then, if they’re not working out, fire fast. Do not hesitate, do not wait, fire fast. And I’ve done consulting for many, many years, and many times, I can’t tell you how many times, but lots, They’ve got this world’s worst employee. And then the conversation is about John or Mary. Oh, John’s great this week. Oh, I can’t, I can’t, John did that.

 

Oh, John crashed a truck. Oh, but he wasn’t drunk. I mean, it’s like crazy, right? And they keep this person on for years because they don’t want to go through the emotional pain of firing them. 

 

I just, I just, just heard a quote from Donald Trump and he was talking about the three types of employees he had, he goes, there’s bad employees, there’s good employees, and there’s great employees, he goes, great employees. He goes, you can never pay them too much. Cause they’re going to take you. They’re going to catapult your business.

 

They’re going to take you where you could never go without them. He goes, we love great employees. He goes, bad employees. They’re easy. They’re bad at fire. He goes, good employees are the worst because they’re not bad enough where you fire them. But they’re not great and they kind of just slog along. He goes, good employees are the worst, you know, kind of that milquetoast type employee.

 

Well, the problem is the good employees I talked to the other day, and he has a, he has a production building coming and he did, you have the Peter principle is you promote level people to the level of incompetence and they stay there because you can’t. Demote him because you promoted him and you can’t promote him because not doing a good job.

 

So you get organization, the people that just don’t quite do it. He has a production builder builds like four or five houses a week and he’s down to like three houses a week because production building, he promoted his superintendent to director of construction and he isn’t cutting it, but he’s a friend of his.

 

He’s been around a couple of years and his whole organization is dying because this guy doesn’t know how to build or doesn’t create a process to build a house today. Just can’t pull it off.  And it’s not, I mean, he got promoted to his level of incompetency. Now he’s a friend of the owner, so he doesn’t want to let him go.

 

He doesn’t want to fire the guy, but he’s killing his whole organization. And it happens all the time. I finally convinced him to hire a new guy and demote this guy and say, look, I’ll give you the same amount of pay, but just you’re not cutting the job. And I mean, I would ask everybody listening to this podcast at a very serious question. 

 

Now, Rick, same to you if you have any employees. If you were going to start your organization over today, let’s say for a reason, everybody let go and you had started over again today. And now you had to hire back the people that you had before.  Anybody that you wouldn’t hire back, you should fire.  Yeah.

 

And do you remember Al Mays? He was a coach in the construction for years. I think he’s maybe retired now, but I took a class from his, him once. And he said, He said that he threw the question out there. Well, when, when should you fire somebody? He says, the first time you think about it.  You know, and there’s always this, you know, I’ll tell a couple of sentence are the phone rang you.

 

Oh my God, it’s Sean. You’re not excited about the phone. It’s John. Right. Or  John left a message. Oh, no. I mean, when you, when you hear the person’s name, there’s this sort of dread  that you show up. I mean, like the person only lies 10 percent of the time, but you’re never sure when the 10 percent is. So you can’t know when to trust him.

 

Right. Right. And those kind of people, if they have working for you, they just kill it because you know in your heart that that that guy should go someplace else.  But because you don’t include the emotional pain of firing the guy, you don’t have somebody to replace him because you’re not recruiting, you keep them on.

 

And I would say in any construction company, that’s probably the worst problem I’ve seen. You may have cash flow problems, you may have marketing problems, but when you have the worst employee problems,  It makes it that’s not fun. Yeah, I’ve had because every time you think about that person you go  That’s like that.

 

So if you have anybody that you wouldn’t rehire definitely fire them.  Yeah, we had Lisa you late when I was hiring for I would go in kind of like you as you know Do subcontract sales management and I’d evaluate the the sales team, you know And I called it like you have the you have the The sales people are really in three levels as well.

 

So you have the superstars, the ones that you just need to support, let them do their thing, get out of the way. They’re going to, they’re going to produce for you. Then you have the middle, which is usually about the 50%. You’re always trying to coach them up to get them up and superstar level. And you have the bottom 25, I call those the sales prevention team. 

 

The ones out there that are costing you sales. And it’s kind of like that bad employee as well. It’s like, it is drag you down. And like you said, they, they ruin the culture of the business. Other people in your, in your organization are going to be less productive because of this, this person. They’re just a cancer.

 

So I would come in. Sometimes we call it the queen bee or the king bee, the one that was.  Thought they were above everyone else and they didn’t have to follow internal rules and policies, and they could do whatever they want. You know, the best thing you could do is you say, well, Mr. Builder, you should fire this person.

 

Oh, I can’t fire them because they’re such a good producer. I’m like, no, you don’t understand.  They’re taking away sales from everything else. Your team, get rid of them. You’re gonna be able to produce more. And then you’re going to be able to not have to deal with all of the emotional baggage and crap you’ve got to deal with.

 

Cause they’re usually pre Madonna’s and you can hire up that new person, develop them into your next superstar. That’s going to follow the way that you want to run your company. I mean, I like the sports analogy is a team effort is not a solo effort, right? And you didn’t have an example. It’s on my, my kid’s soccer team, but I think it’s relevant.

 

They have this kid who was one. He was not easy to deal with for sure. And he always hogged the ball playing soccer. He gets the ball and wouldn’t give it to anybody else. And he was just really difficult. And he, and so the coach got rid of him. He says, I can’t have this guy on my team. Everybody freak.

 

And they’ve won way more games after they lost the guy than they did. Cause he was killing the team, even though he was the star, he wasn’t a team player. He didn’t ever pass the ball. He didn’t, he didn’t help build a team spirit. He was always the. The guy who was, he knew was better than everybody else and it just killed the team.

 

So, you know, construction is definitely team sport  and look at, you should all, you know, what team isn’t always recruiting or always having a bitch. That’s, yeah.  So let me go over the six items one more time. Just for our listeners. What were they? Okay. One is the myth is only recruit your needs and you need someone.

 

That’s not true. She’s recruiting all the time. The second one employees are expensive. They’re not best of best insurance. Third is we can do the recruiting ourselves. Okay. That’s not true. Hire somebody that’s good at it. It’s going to be great expenditure of funds. Next, recruit within the construction industry.

 

Not true. You can recruit, you know,  just put construction experience preferred, but not required. Next one is hire fast, fire slow. It’s just the opposite. Hire slow, take your time, find the right person. If they’re the wrong person, boom, let them go. Fire fast. Next is recruiting is a project that ends. It doesn’t ever end.

 

You should always be looking for people all the time So if you get rid of those myths, you’d probably be better at hiring people  yeah, so I always I always found that some of my Same thing I would go to a builder and we would we would put together an ad and start recruiting for sales people and the same thing as I was like frick I want to hire someone with experience and I would say well why?

 

Because then they’ll know what they’re doing. So they can come in here and I don’t have to train ’em, and they’re just gonna take, take and run with it. I said, what you get when you hire someone with experiences, you are bringing over all their bad habits they develop from somebody else. So now what I have to do is I have to untrain those bad habits and now I have to train them up in the way you want to do things.

 

So what would be easier? Having to untrain and retrain or just finding someone with the right characteristics we’re looking for and then train them up. From there, right? I mean, Rick example is a project manager. He’s been in the business 30 years. Shows up with his yellow pad. It says, I do not need anything, but a yellow pad.

 

I’ve been doing this for a long time. Just let me run the project and stay out of my way. This computer stuff, I don’t need it. I’m good with that. And it just kills your organization. If we got a little time, I’d like to go over the best recruiting practices. If you have time to do that, right?  So I’ve learned what you need to do now, whether.

 

You have us do it for you, which I recommend because it’s better than doing it yourself, or you do it yourself. You gotta follow this process, in my opinion. In order to hire a good employee. Never once first is right. You know, the art of writing a job ad, it’s got a lot easier with chat GPT, go to chat GPT and say, write me an ad for a project manager, like your HR professional.

 

But you’ve got to write a killer ad again. It is an ad. It is not a description.  The idea is you’re getting somebody to quit the current job. They’ve got to come to work for you. So it’s a lead with things like, are you not appreciated where you are? Do you feel like you’re better than the rest of your employees?

 

Is your boss not treating you? Well, you need to lead with something that’s going to appeal to the person you want. Don’t say looking for a project manager must have five years experience, blah, blah, blah. That’s a job description and add an ad is the idea is supposed to get somebody to buy your stuff.

 

Right? So it’s a job ad. Make sure you write a great, great job ad. Yeah. That’s the first one. Don’t use convention. The second one, where do you post a job ad? Post it everywhere. We post it on a hundred, a hundred and some job boards, plus LinkedIn, plus, you know, all the social media. We do it on, you know, what is it?

 

Monster. We search your databases. Place it everywhere you possibly can. Even put a poster on your supplier’s thing. Don’t just put it in deed and figure it done. That’s important.  The next one is this is the most important and the hardest to do. Probably respond immediately.  Don’t, you know, when people, you know, we respond to people who do it in real time.

 

If somebody applies for us, they hit send 10 seconds later to get. Thank you for applying for ABC company. We really appreciate your resume. Do it immediately. It’s just like marketing. How fast you follow up a good lead. And,  and, and just to interject here, so I know you’re,  so I hired you, you’re helping me right now.

 

So we have a software I log into and I kind of, and I do it almost daily as I get notifications, but when that, when that ad response comes in, that candidate comes in responding to that ad, then there’s an AI built into it where they, they get that, Immediate email. It looks like it says, Hey, just wanna let you know we received your application,  right?

 

I mean,  so it’s important. You respond immediately. Do not wait. Okay. It’s just like if you get a marketing call, you don’t call him back 3 days later because they’ve already gone to somebody else and all the good people also look at this way. If you’re applying, you must be applying for 10 companies, not for one.

 

When you’re looking for a service, you’re calling, you’re going down Google and calling five people.  If you, if you apply for 10 companies and only one says, thank you for applying. We’re getting right back to you. Which company looks the best to work for?  Exactly. Somebody who’s on the ball. Okay. So respond in, in minutes, not days.

 

And it’s hard to do because we have to go through, we go through three or four, you know, applications a week. Three, 4, 000 applications a week. We have to go through 200 applications to find a guy. So the reality is what owner or person in office has time 24 seven to call his people back right away. It’s just not realistic.

 

Cause it, again, there’s an average of, I think, 200 applicants every time we hire a person. Okay. The next one is selection process. It’s key.  Here’s an assessment. There’s a lot of good psychological tools out there. He’s an assessment has a lot of AI in it. I’ll know about you being your mom. If you take this thing.

 

So get a good assessment process or something. There’s a Colby, there’s disc. There’s a bunch of stuff out there. Make sure you do a good psychological assessment of the person before you hire them. The technology is there. And we have, I think the best, but it doesn’t matter. Find some technology. So, you know, the person’s intelligence, their integrity, you know, what, what, whether the right person, I, for the job, do a really good analysis of that person.

 

And it’s, you know, people just don’t use the tools and that makes it really hard. The next one is after you, you know, do a good analysis, as far as an assessment goes, do a video interview. We have video interviews that we do for everybody, you know, and And we structure those video interviews depending on each person.

 

So we always do video interviews. Because there’s some things you can’t find in an assessment. I mean, what do they look like? What do they come across with? I mean, how are they as a human being? You can’t tell some of those things unless you watch a video. Okay. And then always do reference checks  because You know, I had one guy that hired a bookkeeper, embezzled him, hired the next bookkeeper, embezzled him, and he went to the DA’s office and he said, look, didn’t you realize a bookkeeper you just hired got fired for embezzlement?

 

I mean, come on, right?  So it’s like, you know, do reference checks and background checks, okay? So if you do all those things, You’re much more likely to find a good person. I think there’s lots of great people out there. As I said, we generally don’t have problems in finding good people because we follow the process, but most contractors literally don’t have time to do this.

 

And if, even if you give them the tools, that’s why I did this company. Cause I give you the tools. I’ll give you a good assessment, you know, good, how to do all this stuff. You don’t have time to do it. It’s like a half time job for anybody, at least. You know, and we, when we have got a client, there’s four people on the team.

 

There’s a recruiter, there’s a person who scans resumes 24 7, they have an assistant, there’s another person that does all the  applicant facing stuff, makes them take the resume assessments, calls them, does make sure the applicants know we’re interested in them. That’s the account manager. And then there’s a specialist you talk to every week.

 

So we have four people on the team just to hire for a guy, right? Yeah. And can you picture in your company, who in the heck’s going to do that?  One of the things I noticed as I’m going through and I’m, you know, you, you, you look at the candidates and again, I’m  using your software. So I see the resume. I see.

 

How they responded. I can look at the assessment,  you know, and I’m looking at this. I’m like,  number one,  I’m really so happy that I hired a recruiter because I need somebody to protect me from myself because sometimes you look at a resume and you fall in love with a candidate, and then you start to overlook some of the red flags that are popping up, you know, as you’re following this process, and it’s so nice to have you know, I’m working with Carell, Just to say, Hey, what do you think of this candidate?

 

What are these assessments? What do you see? Are there some red flags here? And where? Then if you, if that person says, Hey, you know what? This looks like a really good candidate,  pursue them. So it’s like, okay, set. Or, you know, Rick, the resume looks good, but this, this, and this popped up. So this is a candidate I would probably.

 

You know, not stay away from and one that I, you know, those behavior traits, you know, that I, I found with the assessment that that you’re using. I mean, those are phenomenal. You have to look at somebody’s, you know, do they blame others that take responsibility to you know, how cooperative are there?

 

Are they willing to follow leadership? Are they I forget the other one. Loyalty. You know, some of the things in there. It’s like, wow, that’s just amazing. You can find out the characteristics, the personality traits because I always look at it and say, if I have the right characteristics, I can train somebody up.

 

I can coach. I can train them up, but I need somebody that’s going to believe in the mission of what we’re doing here. and is going to be loyal. And if there’s a bump in the road, they’re not going to lose it or blame somebody else, but they’re going to actually be professional. And that is, I think, you know, one of the really biggest advantage of really partnering when you hire someone, because man,  you talk, look at your fee.

 

If you hire the wrong person, we were talking about this, you know, you’re six months into it. You realize you hired the wrong person. You spend all that money hiring the wrong person. You put all that time and effort into coaching and training them. And six months later, you just went backwards. Now you have to completely start over all that time and energy and money that you spent on that person for six months is all gone.

 

I mean, that’s what I do. You know, we do it monthly. It’s, it’s much more if you do it like on a commit for a year, cause I think people should do that. We have a really, I consider a low monthly fee compared to, I mean, a lot of people say, I hired more to hire my last project, my project manager, and I’ve hired you for all it paid you all year. 

 

It’s way, because we use a lot of our labor. We use a lot of, you know, AI, so we can do it way better and cheaper than almost anybody out there. That’s why I’ve grown so well. So, I mean, if you’re going to do it yourself, at least follow the best practices that’ll make sure it happens again, there’s plenty of great people out there now.

 

It’s harder to find the average, I think, employee in construction is like 45 years old and it’s getting tougher, but it’s sort of like. If you haven’t got enough leads, it’s because your marketing isn’t doing its job, right? If you’re not converting, there are systems out there on how to be very successful.

 

I just talked to an interesting venture capitalist the other day. And he said, and he, you know, he has like lots of money, millions. He’s been doing business. He wants to, he’s going into the roofing business in the middle of the country. I said, why? He goes, look at the old guys. They don’t know. They stuck in their old ways.

 

They don’t know how to, you know, market. They don’t know how our people, they’re just not good at business, but they’ve been there forever. Not much.  The other people are two guys in a truck. They don’t have the right systems, the right things. They know what they’re doing. I can go in and just kill it. I could become the, you know, the largest roofer in my market in like four years because I’ve got good systems.

 

I know how to find good people, how to find good clients. I’ve got the systems and I can make like 40 percent margin on this stuff. He says, I can’t think of a better business to be in than roofing. And I go, that makes sense. Right. But so construction is a great industry. There’s huge opportunity, but just make sure you use the right systems.

 

And it’s already done for you. Find a great marketing system, find a great recruiting system, get good clients, good employees, and you’ll do well. But unless you have somebody help you with your marketing, which I highly recommend and have somebody help you to recruiting like us, it’s going to be tough because if you can’t find a good client, say clients, you shouldn’t take, which we’ve all had those.

 

That’s a disaster, right? And you take them and they like cost you money. Don’t pay their bill. They’re difficult to deal with. Bad clients are terrible. Same with the employees. You have employees that don’t show up. They, you know, they lie occasionally. It makes life difficult. So again, this is a great industry.

 

If you’ve got great clients, great employees, and the system’s out there to do both. And so I suggest you do both because that way you’ll be a happy contractor versus somebody who’s not happy.  Very nice way to end this. And I just think, you know, one other thing Which was one of your you know, I can’t afford this employee,  you know, I think that’s a sticking point for a lot of people.

 

And honestly, I’ve looked at that as well, you know, like looking at what the hiring needs I have. But one of the things I keep reminding myself is like, you know, what is the highest and best use of my time? You know, where should I be focusing my time? Because if I don’t have that great employee to do those things that I shouldn’t be doing, sure, can I do them?

 

Yes. But is it the highest and best use of my time? No. I’m never going to be able to make, add efficiencies into my my, my business, I’m going to make product improvements or come up with new offerings, improve my marketing, basically run my business. And so we used to say from a salesperson’s perspective, it’s like most salespeople  when they are meeting directly with the client, they’re 500 an hour people, I said, why are you having your salesperson do change orders?

 

You can hire a 15 an hour person change. If  you don’t have an administrative assistant, you are one.  Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, anything that you can delegate should be delegated. Just focus on your core competencies and focus on running that business, growing the business, and ultimately getting yourself out of the day to day so that you can really be a business owner and run it as more of a CEO type person.

 

Well, it’s hard to make that transition sometimes from investment to entrepreneur. It’s a tough road for some people, but if you’re going to succeed, you’re going to have to pull it off. Yeah. And that’s, it’s always, at least in my perspective, it’s always that Ramallah doing a million. And they want to get, you know, they, they’re pretty much, they built their company up so high, but now they’re at the point where they really got to hire some help, they want to take it to the next level.

 

They want to get to three, five, eight, 10 million that home 4 million. Now they want to get up to the good 10, 20 million a year. That’s the leap right there. I see is that you have to hire people and yeah, you can make a lot of mistakes. By hiring the wrong people and sell yourself back. So very, very, very, very wise words, Paul.

 

Anything else you want to, you want to finish with here, Paul? Paul, I would say, I love this quote that smart people learn from their mistakes and wise people learn from the mistakes of others. 

 

Well, my last question was any words of wisdom. There it is. That is where you learn from the mistakes of others. Don’t make them yourself. Absolutely. Absolutely. We will put a link below here But if somebody is interested in your services wants to get in touch with you, what is the best way? They can go to contractorstaffingsource.

 

com they can email me my email is paul at paulsanderman. com Or they can my cell phone literally is 415 599 9006. I’ll take calls Just make sure i’m in hawaii, so don’t call too early. You And again, you know, just  we’ll talk to you about what you need to do. If you want yourself fine, we’ll explain what you need to do.

 

If you want us to do it fine. But you know, if you’re having problems, finding employees, trust me, it’s you, it’s not the market.  And if you want to get some help, It can be, there’s no, we have no problem finding great employees for everybody. I said, you know, we hired what four and eight people actually 17 didn’t work out.

 

That’s not an accident. The industry’s averages might be less than 50 percent or it’s like 95 percent just because you use the right processes. So, you know, if you’re having a problem finding employees, don’t blame the market, don’t blame the industry. You know, when, when, when you’re pointing your finger at, you know, it’s someone’s four feet, was it three fingers were pointing back at you?

 

It’s all about you. So take the time and energy to do what you need to do to fix the problem because It isn’t outside of you. It’s your practices. That’s the problem.  Very, very true. Very, very true So we’ll put your link below here get in touch with paul talk to him about your hiring needs and and he’s got a great system I’m using it right now and and i’m very comfortable to hire four people here probably In the next 30 to 60 days, so it’s really cool to see how that process is  So my brother,  pardon me.

 

I said, thanks for having me. I appreciate being here. Oh, yeah, absolutely. This is great. Great information. And for my brothers and sisters in Christ, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Always. We’ll see you next time on conversation.